Jeffrey Beck

I first attended Towards a Science of Consciousness (TSC) in 2012, and when people asked me why I was there, my response was “Because conscious robots from the future were trying to convince me to build them, and I was trying to figure out if I should go along with their plans”. At that time, there wasn’t even a place in the conference taxonomy for machine consciousness. By now, the question of consciousness in machines is a mainstream topic in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and it has been part of the conference program for a decade. Norbert Wiener was a pioneer in what he called cybernetics. My MS program was focused on “System Dynamics and Controls”, which included ideas like adaptive and optimal control, how to build controllers that can bootstrap themselves a bit, based on inherent design. To me, humans are an instance of a universal adaptive controller (UAC). After years of working in cybernetics Wiener became concerned about social and moral implications of his work. He seemed to be concerned that he was potentially creating a monster of sorts, what the Rabbi of Prague called a Golem, a physical creature with no soul, what for me might be a creature with agency but no consciousness. We currently have human instances of UAC’s that seem incapable of feeling, at least what others are feeling, and cause significant pain and suffering through greed and insatiable hunger for attention. Are we building agentic AI systems that will be the same but with more ability to execute and no ability to suffer the consequences? To me it seems critical to integrate the subjectivity of consciousness into autonomous systems. To do this we need to understand how consciousness connects to the physical body. For me, consciousness is where the undecidable meets the computable, programming the neurology that becomes automatic. We need to understand this more completely, we need agents to feel the pain they cause, and to feel love such that they can be aligned with the collective values of the society that they will be born into. We need a plan and we need to implement it as soon as possible!

Jeffrey has a BS in Mining Engineering, an MS in Mechanical Engineering and has been the inventor on numerous US Patents, mostly involved in multiphase vortex flows in industrial applications.  He farms and keeps busy wondering how to integrate science and spiritually, even in his sleep.